


The Unforgiving Minute

by Lena7142, Scappodaqui



Series: If [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Runs Track, Character Study, Fanart, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Light Angst, M/M, Pre-Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-03-24 20:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3783319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lena7142/pseuds/Lena7142, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky runs track partly because Steve can't. He has complicated feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Set in 1930-1934, a character study of Bucky Barnes, 880 yard runner.<br/> </p><p>  <i>The 880, as a physiological endeavor, closely resembled the organ failure that accompanied death by drowning. The first lap would, and should, pass in a blaze of furious piston-pumping agony. The second was the protracted struggle not to suffocate on the fumes you’d built up, while your legs carried you thoughtless to the end.  Even the best 880 men looked to be in slow freefall around the final turn.</i></p><p>Story by Scap, art by Lena7142.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lena7142](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lena7142/gifts).



In 1938, the world record for the mile stood at 4:04.4. The man who set it had been told he’d never walk again. He had been threatened with double amputation following a fire and gone through extensive medical treatment. His name was Glenn Cunningham.

In 1943, a man ran the mile in 2:54.3, though it would never stand as an official record. The man who ran it had been diagnosed with asthma, diabetes, color-blindness, and scoliosis. He was classified 4F by the U.S. Army five times before he went through Dr. Erskine’s experimental procedure. His name was Steve Rogers.

 

**Brooklyn, 1930-1933.**

Baseball and the grand green sweep of Ebbets Field lay closest to their hearts. There was far less glamor in the flat expanse of clay track outside St. Joseph’s School: hard, dusty, the color of an old pencil eraser. Bucky really did prefer the looseness and camaraderie of baseball. But Mister Higgins, who taught Literature and Composition and also coached track, pulled him aside in the lot outside the school one day when some of them were playing ball. Bucky had just finished running the bases after a clean whack of a home run. He squinted up at Mister Higgins from behind the circles of charcoal he'd smeared around his eyes in imitation of Babe Ruth.

Mister Higgins said, “You, son, belong in track and field. Tomorrow, four o’clock.” He was a slight man, graying. People talked sometimes about how he’d almost been a Rhodes scholar and how he kept a flask in his desk and how he’d served in the War. You listened to Mister Higgins. He read them Rudyard Kipling poems in class.

He ignored Steve, standing with battered catcher’s mitt in hand just over Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky wasn’t sure about the idea at first. It seemed like an awful lot of effort, for one thing. Also, he didn’t see the point of running if you were just going to go around and around in circles. Though he’d come to suppose that a lot of life was like that when you got right down to it. Actually, baseball was like that. At least there were more rules to it. 

Besides, if he did join the track team, it would be without Steve. 

“You should do it,” Steve said afterwards. The walk down Brooklyn Street took longer than when Bucky jogged home alone, and he liked to watch the slanting shadows between buildings grow and overlap. Steve had trouble seeing in dim light, though. Bucky had to grab him by the elbow before he stepped off a curb. 

“No, you should,” Steve said, as they both ignored the misstep. “If you’d be good at it.” He wasn’t looking at Bucky but at the sidewalk up ahead, squinting carefully.

Bucky understood what it meant to have choices other people didn’t. It meant you ought to take them.

Steve came to all of his meets and even some of his practices to sketch, because that was what he had a talent for. Bucky would jog up to him after the warmdown and, panting, hang over the fence while Steve showed him what he’d been drawing, flipped through pages of hurdlers drawn in big, dynamic poses mid-jump. The javelin-throwers, coiled springs sketched in gesture. The almost comical headlong sprawl of the high-jumpers and the balletic triple jumpers. The angular exhaustion of the 880 boys and the milers, Bucky himself easily picked out by the jaunty swirl of hair Steve pressed in with dark pencil. Steve looked happy showing Bucky the pictures, even when Bucky leaned too far over the sketchbook and dripped sweat on it.

It occurred to him at some point that Steve liked drawing these things because Steve wished he could do these things himself, but the notion made him feel a little sick, so he stopped thinking about it.

Track wasn’t so bad. Largely because it turned out that Bucky really liked to win. The year he was thirteen he won a lot. It helped that he was taller and bigger than most of the boys his age. He didn’t remember it being all that much of an effort to cruise through the first 440 and have enough left to kick it at the end. The very most he liked the celebratory lap at the end, the warmdown when he bumped sweaty shoulders with teammates and collected their pats on the back, the scattered clapping from the bleachers around the track. 

Bucky Barnes had always liked applause, and it was nice to get it from more than his sisters, mother, and Steve. He cultivated a dazed, happy expression that contained touches of both humility and triumph, an ‘aw, shucks’ kind of look. He practiced different ways of pumping both fists in the air. He could pump his fists gently, so that you could see his pleasure in a job well down. Or more violently, in a raw display of dominance, as if shaking a spear in primal victory. 

And Steve really didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he stayed almost all the way through most meets, watching and sketching even if a light drizzle began during their long, achy warmdown. After which Bucky would jog over, legs shaking a little, and they’d walk each other home. Sometimes, after a hard meet, Bucky coughed almost as much as Steve did. His came out a healthy, throat-clearing sort of a cough, in companionable chorus with Steve’s lighter, thready wheeze.

The year he was fourteen it got harder. There was a new kid, faster than him. Practices stopped being quite as much fun. Rest intervals between sprints got shorter, leaving him only time to grab his knees and gulp for air before he had to stagger the hundred yards to the next, lean into the curve, take off. Slow, stumble, start again. The only reason he didn’t let himself stop was Steve, watching, sketching. It wouldn’t be fair to Steve. But he did stop practicing victory poses in the mirror after he came in third at their regional meet, and he started hanging back off his top paces in practice. Not far back, but back enough that he didn’t have to see stars between laps. 

When Steve wasn’t there, he skipped out on practice to take Katie to the soda fountain, having found that Katie, with her wide-eyed fascination at his jokes, required less of him than did certain other people.

Mister Higgins pulled him aside the next day after he had run his penalty laps and said, “James, where’s your fight?” 

He scratched at the back of his neck, tilting his head down. He could smell his own sweat and taste the rust-colored dust kicked up from the track, and he felt bitter, wasn’t it enough? “Dunno,” he said. “Didn’t know it was a fight.” In fights, of course, he almost always won, because he had a very good reason, that being, to keep Steve from getting walloped.

“It’s always a fight.” Mister Higgins paused. “You can give in to the doubt and fear and hold yourself back,” he said, “and you won’t win again. You do have it in you. But until you want it badly enough that you aren’t afraid of the pain, you won’t win. Some boys can, you know,” he added with brutal precision. “You’re not quite good enough.”

Later, Mister Higgins informed him, in his dry way, that to be fair he had picked a very difficult event. The 880, as a physiological endeavor, closely resembled the organ failure that accompanied death by drowning. The first lap would, and should, pass in a blaze of furious piston-pumping agony. The second was the protracted struggle not to suffocate on the fumes you’d built up, while your legs carried you thoughtless to the end. Even the best 880 men looked to be in slow freefall around the final turn.

That winter Steve spent a week in the hospital with pneumonia.

And that spring Bucky ran his best times ever on his way to taking first place at a city-wide meet, both in the 880 and as anchor leg in the mile relay. When he broke through the tape at the finish he staggered and went down on his hands and knees, for the first time unstrung, blind and deaf and shaking as if he’d stepped inside a just-rung bell. Turned out, that got him even more applause than the fist-pumping. But all he could think was, _Thank God that’s over._ His breathing sounded loud in his ears, but still not as loud as the rattle in Steve’s chest that January.

 _Not good enough._ It turned out running a 2:04.6 wasn’t good enough to get him a ticket to college, and his track career wound up there. He came away from the whole thing with the dazed sense that he’d never quite tried hard enough. Also, the conviction that Steve had gotten pneumonia from sitting out in the rain to watch him run.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From the sketchbooks of Steven Grant Rogers, c. 1936 – Depictions of James Buchanan Barnes, which reveal Rogers’ childhood friend to have been an accomplished track athlete prior to the war. [Smithsonian Exhibit]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by [Lena7142](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Lena7142/pseuds/Lena7142).

[](https://36.media.tumblr.com/646d2ec1f4c9a4f0f42c72c6bd5894be/tumblr_nyvkqrzJ4v1ryifbbo1_540.jpg)

[](https://40.media.tumblr.com/3bf82d18089a6bbde553576d1dfb1e33/tumblr_nyvkqrzJ4v1ryifbbo2_540.jpg%22)

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently MCU Bucky was “an athlete” and a “a good student.” Naturally, I wondered--what sport? And why does MCU Steve seem to find running such a comforting routine? Maybe it's a reminder of when he used to watch his best friend.
> 
> Anyway, this turned into a bit of a character study of Bucky, and I hope it came through all right (I have many thoughts on his psychology). Much thanks to Lena7142, a far better fan than I am, for help with canon and for the beautiful accompanying fanart.
> 
> Some quick notes: the 880 refers to the 880 yard race, about half a mile or two laps of a standard 440-yard track. Bucky runs that event and also the 440 yard anchor leg of the mile relay (4 x 440). The 880, or its equivalent today, the 800m, really is known as one of the most difficult events in track racing. Almost all 800m records have been run with the first lap faster than the second, so the race ends in a kind of controlled implosion. 
> 
> I stole Mister Higgins's name shamelessly from _Pygmalion_ (1913, Bernard Shaw), later adapted into _My Fair Lady_. And yes, he is intended to be an alcoholic WW I veteran who suffered from shell shock.
> 
> The title comes from [Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If'](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772).
> 
> This is now Part I of a series!


End file.
